Shelby Oaks Ending Decoded: What Really Happened to Riley Brennan

Chris Stuckmann's 'Shelby Oaks' is the kind of horror movie that starts like a YouTube creepypasta and ends in a full-on nightmare about family, trauma, and a demon with very long-term plans. It borrows the jittery dread of 'The Blair Witch Project' and the slow-bleed grief of 'Hereditary', then steers into some nasty, upsetting territory. Not every thread gets tied off, but the thing gets under your skin and stays there.

• Director: Chris Stuckmann
• Cast: Camille Sullivan, Brendan Sexton III, Keith David, Sarah Durn, Robin Bartlett, Michael Beach
• Runtime: 1h 42m
• IMDb: 5.6/10
• Rotten Tomatoes: 55%
• Where to watch: Rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV

The setup

Two sisters, one unraveling mystery. Riley Brennan is a rising paranormal YouTuber with her crew, the Paranormal Paranoids. Then the whole team vanishes at an abandoned amusement park called Shelby Oaks. The others are eventually confirmed dead; Riley is not. Her sister, Mia, spends years digging for answers, and the movie shifts from found-footage jitters to a more grounded, emotional kind of dread as she gets closer to the truth. Fair warning: that truth is bleak.

What actually happened to Riley

The short version: a demon-backed cult steals her life. The long version: Mia's only real lead arrives when a rattled man named Wilson Miles shows up at her door with a tape that hints he knows where Riley is. Before Mia can process any of it, Wilson kills himself right in front of her. That pushes Mia deeper down the rabbit hole and eventually to Wilson's mother, Norma, who has been hiding Riley in her basement for years.

Norma is serving an incubus — a male demon — that the film identifies as Tarion (you will also hear Tario at one point, which is either a slip or a lore wrinkle). Wilson has been under Tarion's control, too. The demon has been orbiting the Brennan sisters since they were kids; Riley treated it like an imaginary friend, and Mia once saw the thing peering through a crack in Riley's bedroom window. Target acquired, basically.

Norma kept Riley captive and forced Wilson to sexually assault her until she conceived a son meant to host Tarion — think spreading his influence in the real world. When Mia finally finds Riley and gets her out, Riley tries to kill the baby to stop the cycle. Mia stops her. They struggle, Riley crashes through that same cracked window, and outside she's torn apart by hellhounds. It's brutal, and it's the movie's most gutting sequence for a reason.

Wilson Miles, explained

Wilson is one of the film's nastier surprises. He's not just a messenger; he's a cog the demon has been grinding for years. He spent 2002 to 2007 at the Darke County Correction Center, where he started a fire and escaped. While inside, he literally summoned Tarion and carved Mia and Riley's initials into a wall opposite the demon's symbol — a tidy little clue that the Brennan sisters were on the demon's to-do list long before the Shelby Oaks park incident. Whether Wilson is Norma's biological son or someone she took in for the cult's purposes is left fuzzy, which frankly makes it creepier.

Wilson's job after prison was simple and awful: impregnate Riley so the cult had a newborn vessel. Once the baby existed, his final act was delivering the tape to Mia, effectively passing the baton and triggering the next phase of Tarion's plan.

Why Mia saved the baby (and why that was the point)

Mia's choice is the movie's moral chokehold. Earlier, an in-universe documentary lays out that she and her husband, Robert, tried for years to have a child. No luck. Their empty crib sits there like a wound, and the grief quietly eats their marriage. Robert ultimately bails because he thinks Mia is spiraling into demon-obsessed delusion, but the cracks were there long before.

So when she finds Riley's newborn, Mia does what she's always wanted to do: protect a child. She stops Riley from killing the baby. That choice costs Riley her life — and gives Tarion exactly what he wants. The film strongly implies Mia's infertility wasn't random. Tarion needed a mortal child and a guardian desperate enough to raise him, so he stacked the deck, keeping Mia from conceiving so she would eventually step into this role. By saving the baby, Mia walks right into the trap.

The last beat is nasty: Mia, screaming, as Tario/Tarion embraces her. The implication is grim — she's on deck to become the next Norma, a corrupted caretaker raising the demon's child.

How Mia got pulled into the cult

This isn't a membership so much as a long con. The incubus has stalked the sisters since childhood, visiting their dreams and watching from that cracked bedroom window. During the rescue, a ritual binds the demon's power to the baby. When Mia saves the child, she effectively agrees to raise him, which is the cult's endgame. It's less robes-and-chanting and more a possession pipeline that runs through family ties and grief.

Theme check: the demon is a metaphor (and it hurts)

Stuckmann frames Tarion as an embodiment of childhood trauma — something that starts small, keeps showing up, and eventually shapes everything if you never confront it. That cracked window is the film's visual thesis, and yes, it's used in the most literal, devastating way when Riley dies.

"We all experience things in our youth that stay with us... maybe we saw something that disturbed us, an image we're never able to get out of our minds."

"The crack in the window has always been there... if a childhood wound is never healed, it will grow and it will spiderweb, and it will shatter us. It will eventually eat us alive."

"Sometimes, to get something you want, you have to sacrifice something you have."

It's not subtle, and it isn't tidy. But the way the movie ties a YouTube ghost-hunting disappearance to generational damage and a demon's long game is, honestly, what makes it burrow into your head. Even when the lore gets wobbly — Tarion, Tario, pick a spelling — the emotional throughline is sharp: love curdles into obligation, guilt masquerades as duty, and by the time you realize you're being used, it's too late.

'Shelby Oaks' is available to rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV.